Twin Peaks – Season 3: “The Return, Part 3”

* For a recap & review of Parts 1 & 2, click here.
* For a recap & review of Part 4, click here.Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) falls through that space of darkness. Amazingly strange visuals here, love the new evolution of what Lynch is doing here. Soon, Dale falls to a balcony overlooking black ocean waves. One thing I’ve always loved, that plays through into these surreal sequences, is the calmness of our faithful FBI agent. His mind is so open he’s willing to experience these often terrifying things with a grace and poise not many would have, I’m sure. This whole scene is unnerving. Like Coop’s lost in a wasteland of some kind, the building he enters is a nightmare. He finds a lady with no eyes – almost resembling Josie Packard – sitting inside by a fireplace. She mumbles, touching his face. Then a loud pounding on the walls.
Coop notices a safe-type contraption on the back wall with a visible number 15 on it. He goes toward it but the thing repels him, and the eyeless woman urges him to leave. He follows her up through a trap door and onto an odd structure, in the middle of a starry sky, on top of which is a lever the woman pulls. Electricity throbs and then sends her flying out into space while Coop watches helplessly. Through the sky floats a face that says “Blue Rose“— remember, Gordon Cole (David Lynch) and his Blue Rose Cases?
Love that more of the pieces are beginning to fit now in the series’ return.Back inside the structure, Coop discovers a woman, dressed similarly to the eyeless woman. But she does have eyes, and a watch with no face. On the wall, the safe-like contraption now has the number 3 above it. Cut to bad Coop in his car, as the time approaches 3 PM. We move back and forth between these places, as the good Cop somewhere further than the Black Lodge is trying to find a way to get himself back to the world. As he moves closer to the thing with the 3, bad Coop feels himself get weak, and good Coop is slowly sucked through its middle, leaving his shoes behind. The doppelganger proceeds in flipping his car, as the empty cigarette lighter’s electricity crackles, threatening to haul him inward. And outside the car appear the curtains of the Black Lodge.

“When you get there, you will already be there.”

Elsewhere, a guy named Doug (MacLachlan) is with a prostitute, he feels his left arm going numb. He’s also wearing the owl ring on the same hand. The guy has terrible pains in his gut, falling to the floor. He vomits brutally before being pulled into nowhere; the Black Lodge curtains again appear. Bad Coop vomits what looks similar to creamed corn – garmonbozia – everywhere then passes out.
Doug, however, is in the lodge. There, he finds Phillip Gerard, the One Armed Man (Al Strobel) watching him. “Someone manufactured you,” he tells Doug: “For a purpose.” And now the purpose is done. Gradually the guy’s hand starts shrinking, the ring falls off, and his head disappears in a smoky black shadow. An orb rises from him then he disintegrates into a fleshy pod and further vanishes. Whooooa.
Thus, Gerard puts the owl ring back in its place on the marble table. More electricity in the mythology now, as Agent Cooper shows up through the electrical sockets in the house where Doug and the prostitute were shacking up. He’s got no shoes, either. He isn’t exactly feeling himself. Still has a key to the Great Norther Hotel in Twin Peaks in his pocket, too.
In the meantime someone’s watching them. They’re near Sycamore Street, in fact; wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Someone’s looking for Doug, though when Coop drops his Great Northern key it looks like he isn’t in the car, and the men watching are thwarted. For now.A junkie in a nearby house screams “one one nine” over and over. I wonder, does she deal with spirits from the Black Lodge? Are these numbers connected to those Coop’s been told by both the Arm and the Giant?
Bad Coop’s car is found by officers on highway patrol. They smell something disgusting inside and can’t even open the door, so they call in reinforcement with gas masks. I imagine he’s basically a puddle of skin and blood and creamed corn.
At the police station in Twin Peaks, Deputy Chief Hawk (Michael Horse), Andy and Lucy Brennan (Harry Goaz & Kimmy Robertson) look through a mountain of various evidence. The typically quirky, hilarious dialogue ensues between our old favourites. Andy’s not AS goofy as he was, though still foolish in the best sort of sense. Hawk keeps pressing himself to figure out the clues left by the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) even if his two pals aren’t overly helpful.
And what about ole Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn)? He’s out at that camper, spray painting shovels. I’m endlessly curious about this, because the doc was always an odd duck. Right from the first episode of the original Twin Peaks run he was a weirdo, and I can only imagine what he’s up to now.
Cooper connects words from Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in his newest Black Lodge experience to the prostitute, as she urges him to go. He walks spaced out into a casino’s revolving door, still not adjusted to life back in the real world anymore. LOVE seeing Meg Foster at the cash dispensary, she’s awesome! Poor Coop wanders the casino floor, he sees a flash of the Black Lodge’s curtains and the patterned floor. So he sits at a slot machine and hits a big win. He goes from one machine to the next, hitting jackpots. Yet all he can say is “call for help.” He continues seeing machines lit up with the tiny vision of the Black Lodge. Jackpots everywhere. Even helps a dirty old woman hit it big!At FBI HQ in Philly, Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), Director Gordon Cole, and others look over a murder case involving young women, a boy, an automatic weapon, some pliers, and a jar of beans or something similar. They’ve also got a few things about New York to discuss. Mutilated bodies in an apartment complex; yes, that one we saw in Parts 1 and 2. They have evidence of the glass box, and a recording of the eerie apparition in the darkness.
Then Cole receives a call about Agent Cooper after all these years.

“The absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence.”

Amazing. Just spectacularly weird, wild stuff. It’ll only continue.
Now with Agent Cooper back in the real world with Gordon and Albert on their way to meet him, there’s bound to be a deepening sense of the surreal working its way farther and farther into these next episodes. And that’s saying something!
A new case, a new world. Bring it on.

An Update from Father Gore

Seek & Ye Shall Find

Father Gore is first and foremost a passionate lover of film— especially horror. He's also a Master's student at Memorial University of Newfoundland with a concentration in postmodern critical theory, currently writing a thesis which will be his debut novel of literary fiction, titled Silence. He also used to write for Film Inquiry frequently during 2016-17 and is currently contributing to Scriptophobic in a column called Serial Killer Celluloid focusing on film adaptations about real life murderers. As of September 2018, Father Gore is an official member of the Online Film Critics Society.